Trees Offer a Simple Solution to Extreme Heat at Cricket Grounds

In those dog days of late June, when it was too hot to do anything but count down the hours until the sun went down, sport frazzled as well. Horse races were cancelled, a guest village provided shade at the Wimbledon qualifiers, and all around the UK school activities were wiped out, from sports days to the national rounders tournament.

At the third Test at Trent Bridge, where England’s men were playing New Zealand in what turned out to be Ben Stokes’s last hurrah, the England and Wales Cricket Board pressed the button on their extreme heat policy and did what they could to protect players and crowd from temperatures that an open ground in the Midlands was not built to deal with.

There were extra water stations, alongside regular reminders to the crowd to keep hydrated, more ambulances and more doctors. Stewards set up chairs in cooler parts of the stadium, while the players were plied with drinks. The first few days were more like an endurance event than a sporting celebration, and it was fitting that England went down in a blaze of infamy.

It is hard to mitigate against extreme heat in cricket, other than move start times to the evening and reduce the number of overs. The game takes place on an open field, over a long period of time, and at grassroots level there are none of the fancy ice vests and isotonic rehydration experts available to the professionals.

But there is one simple thing that recreational – and first-class – grounds can do to bring both shade and comfort to players and supporters: plant trees.

Trees are the earth’s natural lungs, ventilators and nurses. They provide shelter and help reduce air temperature, partly through shade but also because they transpire and release water to the atmosphere. They massage the immune system, alleviate stress, reduce air pollution – and they do it all for free.

There is one tree that, for cricket fans, stands above all others, a quasi religious symbol of the game and provider of bats: the willow. As luck would have it, it also happens to be a wildlife god.

Mark Cocker is a naturalist and Guardian County Diarist as well as a judge for The Cricketer magazine’s Greenest Cricket Ground competition. He says: “More invertebrates live on willow trees [452 species] than any other trees, with their closest contenders being our oaks [423]. They also support 160 lichens. They are key members of the natural community at key moments of wider seasonal hardship. Their March blossom is a lifesaver for spring insects, while the trees’ infestations with 23 aphid species makes them rich protein sources for birds all summer long.

“Willows are in effect ecosystems. They also have a further secret power that is incredibly beneficial, a capacity for ‘cleaning up’ polluted soils and water, a process known as phytoremediation. They are able to absorb heavy metals, excess nutrients and pesticides from contaminated environments. They are thus nature’s clean-up team.”

Willows also grow incredibly quickly, at their full height in 20 years, unlike the mighty but unhurried oak. They propagate easily from cuttings – Cocker cut some stakes to prop up his onions this spring and they rooted in his vegetable patch. Just don’t, he warns, plant them next to the clubhouse or a drainage system, and if your cricket ground is somewhere dry you need to make sure your cutting is plunged into the water table. A native species best supports wildlife – and amateurs are not going to be able to grow willows to make their own bats.

There is scientific backing for the power of trees. Researchers at Cambridge University found that they could be extremely effective at reducing air temperature in urban environments – by up to 12 degrees in some places – but they had to be the right trees, in the right places.

Ronita Bardhan, Cambridge professor of sustainable built environment & health, thinks that planting trees around cricket grounds is more straightforward. “The wide open space of a cricket ground allows heat to escape fast and trees will help you to ventilate. The leaves are like the leaves of a fan and will move the air which is accumulating near the cricket ground and drive it up. And that’s very important.

“So it’s a good idea to have cricket grounds lined with trees, as long as the trees are not very aggressive in the sense that they change the wind velocity to the level that it counteracts the cricket-playing activity itself. So I think willow are actually very good in that setting.”

We know which way temperatures are going – in the UK we’ve just had the hottest May and June days on record while another European heatwave threatens stages of the Tour de France.

Inequality means that the poorest populations suffer the most in extreme heat, making trees around our urban sports grounds even more important, and they also help with flooding control during periods of heavy rainfall. Planting isn’t an instant fix, but it is simple, relatively cheap, and one positive thing we can do for those coming after us into a climate-altered world.

There is a shortage of willow for cricket bats, which bamboo might alleviate, so planting willow is symbolic in all sorts of ways. A tree that has provided for the game over hundreds of years, now protecting it for the future. And a touch of romance for cricket fans, who like nothing better.